DS Family
by Thor2000
Summary: When Carolyn and Maggie babysit Angelique's son, they quickly realized that she has spoiled the boy rotten. He's so unstoppable it takes Quentin and David to stop him, but Quentin's son is in the way...


Since returning from the past and finding Angelique waiting to marry him, Barnabas Collins had done and accomplished much. The old wagon trail from the entrance of Collinwood around the perimeter of the estate and past the Old House had now been paved to where he and his bride could drive directly to the ancestral home. Chris Jennings had faithfully modernized the Old House under Barnabus's often hesitant direction. He also had a son, now four years old, named after Willie Loomis, and a newborn daughter, now three months old, named after his dear-departed sister, Sara Collins, whose spirit had vanished from the estate weeks before her namesake was born. None of them were going to be pulling down or knocking over burning candles. Angelique couldn't be happier either as she fulfilled her dream of being happily married and showering love on the man she loved, and the two children she adored.

"Barnabas," she met him at the door. "I have been cleaning since I woke this morning. Every time I clean one mess, he has another one waiting for me. I am that close…" She showed with her fingers. "To putting a curse on our own little boy."

"Angelique, it can't be that bad." He spoke as a crash came from the kitchen to the back of the house. The former witch sighed and rolled her eyes back as they rushed to the sound.

Standing in a chair pushed to the counter, the short mop-topped tyke with brown eyes quickly looked back in shock. His eyes round with fear, his lips clenched in shock and arms around an imaginary cookie now lying shattered on the floor, he looked adorable if not pathetically scared to death.

"I'm sorry..." he whined as his beautiful mother shook her head in uncontested defeat.

"When it rains," Angelique heard also her daughter screaming upstairs after being wakened by the crash. "It pours." She stood ready to deal with her son but shot the little rascal a glance before instead rushing off to deal with the lesser emergency of her daughter. Barnabas stood alone before his son as a stern but loving father. He gazed down on the young man before him and felt like his father. Unwillingly to let that happen, he grinned understandably toward him.

"William, can't you be more careful?" He asked.

"But I'm just a little boy." the youth grinned as if the more cute he became saved him from another whipping.

"But little boys become young men." Barnabas produced the broom and dustpan. "And young men clean up their mistakes. They also don't eat anything off the floor as if they were beasts."

"That's okay." the boy rationalized. "I dust them off first."

"That's not the point." Barnabas kneeled low to the boy's size. He stared deep into those brown eyes of the child he had created and saw boundless energy and unrestrained mischief and wondered if his father ever looked for the same in him. "You are my son. You will be here after I am gone. I want you to be the best man possible so that when I am gone everyone will know the sort of person I was."

"Where are you going, daddy?" William asked. Barnabas could only chuckle. Almost wishing he could see the world again from the view of his boy, he pulled him tight and hugged him as his father rarely did with him.

"No where right now, son." He replied. "No where now."

PART TWO

The Collins Family dinner was a godsend every Friday as it was the only time for the whole family to get together and go over the week's events. With little Sara in her prettiest dress, and William trussed up in a tiny suit and tie, the proud parents sometimes drove up to the main house in order to keep the children looking the finest, but tonight was so cool and pleasurable that Barnabas preferred the thirty minute walk up the hill.

"Seems like we could get some rain." Barnabas mentioned briskly carried his cane as they reached the green house.

"I think we're getting a storm tonight." Angelique mentioned back. "I hope we can return before it hits."

As usual, little Sara was awed over and William's cheeks pinched by first Maggie and then Carolyn as soon as they entered the foyer of the main house. Liz as old as she was becoming always mustered a big grin at seeing children running loose on the estate once more. Her twilight years were becoming a joy and she loved being a grandmother to little Jason Roger Loomis, otherwise known as J.R. to his cousins. She barely remembered her grandfather herself, but then Edward Collins was oft described as a meandering bore by her late great-uncle Benjamin. Both their portraits decorated the front hall of the foyer, while in the dining room, old portraits of her father and mother, Jamison and Joanna Collins, beamed down on the prospering family.

The dinner conversation shifted as usual between Maggie hoping her second pregnancy would be a boy or girl and how Willie was doing off in the executive training camp to replace Roger in the business. Roger wasn't up to retirement. Left to putter around the estate, he had married again in recent years to an old friend from high school. Barely as old as he was, Rachel Fillmore partially resembled Laura, his first wife, but was energetic and exuberant. Barely embracing the roll of Collins, she usually had to pester and coerce Roger to take her to town.

"Roger," She looked over. "My brother sent me tickets to a play in Bangor. Would you feel like going?"

"It might be nice." Roger cut and separated the chicken on his plate from its bones with the class and dignity of a gentleman. "I'm not exactly fascinated by the population of people here under ten years old."

He looked at the young man across from him. At the dinner table, four-year-old William Collins beamed just like his mother. He grinned the smile that caused Mrs. Johnson to call him "Tiny Terror" just before reaching out and grabbing the chicken leg on his plate. Angelique loved her little boy dearly as she glanced to Roger briefly and then turned to her boy's plate and cut up his vegetables.

"What is it?" The rambunctious youth whispered about the piece she was cutting.

"Eggplant."

"You mean these things grow on trees!"

PART THREE

Little William had wanted to spend the night with his cousin and partner-in-crime Jamison Collins all week, but William was old enough for pre-school and Quentin and Maggie's boy was one year younger. Carolyn and Willie's boy, J.R., was one year younger and at two was still sleeping in a crib. Barnabas and Angelique had left some time before and apparently just barely made it back to the Old House with Sara. As Carolyn went to check the boys still sitting at the dinner table to see if they had finally eaten their eggplant, she found them cheerfully waiting for her.

"Look Aunt Carrie, all gone!" Jameson and William smiled to her.

"Wonderful!" Carolyn smiled back. "You can go play before bed time." She grinned to herself as she watched as the two of them rush off in prepubescent haste. As she picked up their plates, Maggie had come out of the kitchen doors to check on them too.

"They ate it." Carolyn confirmed.

"I wonder..." Maggie knew her boy a lot better and checked the potted plant by the door leading to the kitchen and found the remains of two pieces of sliced up eggplant added to its pot as mulch. She scowled like a displeased mother and realized that Jamison was teaching William his tricks! Angelique would not like that. Her son was supposed to be the best of the lot.

"They are not getting away with this!" Maggie took the plates from Carolyn, took two pieces of the eggplant for each plate from the leftovers and then headed up the back stairs.

In Jamison's room, the two boys were racing cars on Hot Wheel tracks and running cars over green army men. The tiny green commandos obviously had no feelings as they were sadistically run over by dozens of miniature sports cars and scale-size trucks.

"Since you loved the eggplant so much," Maggie replied as she entered and put the plates on the desk and pulled up an extra chair. "I thought you could eat two more helpings."

"And we're going to stay and watch you eat them." Carolyn added with a grin as she gestured William back to his plate. Jamison and William got two very surprised looks on their faces, but William's contorted into a scowl in Jamison's direction. He had had a long out-standing infatuation for his Aunt Carolyn, but right now, she seemed possessed by his mother!

"You and your dumb ideas..." he whispered to his cousin.

PART FOUR

Carolyn had tucked her little boy in to his bed and kissed him good night. A room away, she heard the ruckus nearly coming through the wall. She stepped out of J.R's room and met her Uncle Roger.

"Kitten," He started. "If you don't stifle the spirits of those two crumb-snatchers, I will..."

"Patience, Uncle Roger." She grinned benevolently to her uncle as his frazzled nerves as she realized that letting William sleep in Jamison's room was not a good idea especially with Roger's room right across the hall. She opened her nephew's room with a start as Jamison landed off the bed and on to the floor. William dropped the pillow he was using as a weapon.

"Jamison, bed." She snapped her finger with the authority of a parent and looked to her cousin Barnabas's boy. "William, this way."

"Good night, Aunt Carrie." Jamison chorused as his best friend was led off. Lights off for him, he jumped into his bed as William looked up to his favorite aunt. Blonde and pretty, Carolyn was more like a big sister to him. He held on to her hand and wished he could never let go while he was lead down the hall. With David off to college, the young tyke was soon made comfortable in his Uncle David's room and left alone for the night.

"You'll be in your Uncle David's room." She flicked on the light.

"Won't he be mad?" He looked up at her.

"He'll never know the difference." Carolyn pulled back the blankets and tucked him in. The little terror grinned as she kissed him and even felt a little embarrassed to say anything. Once the lights were out, he glanced up to her eternally diminutive shadow.

"Night, Aunt Carrie." He soon drifted off to sleep. Sometime during the night, though, the light rain sprinkling the estate hit a north wind and turned to a storm. William woke sometime after midnight and listened to the wind whistling through the third story rooms and the shutters being pounded and buffeted upon by strong gales. The pattering of rain became harder as thunder and lightning caused the shadows to move across the room. That and the wind whistling through the attic rooms brought the ghosts to life and William immediately discovered fear.

Seconds later, tiny bare feet scurried down the hall.

"Aunt Carolyn, I'm scared!" His frantic fingers shook her awake.

"What?" She emerged from a dream with David Cassidy and Donny Osmond begging for one of her sugar-laced kisses as she checked her clock and looked around. She frustratingly and tiredly scowled at the storm outside and hoped that Jamison would be running for Quentin and Maggie's bedroom.

"Okay, ouch!" His fifty-pound body scrambled over her body like as some sort of inexperienced commando. Scared and wild-eyed at the storm, he slid under the covers behind her and wished he were home with his mother.

"And you go to sleep." Carolyn told him as she started to drift back off.

"Mommy sings to me when I'm scared."

"I don't do singing."

"I'll go to sleep..." The juvenile con artist added.

"Rock a bye, baby, on the tree top..." Carolyn Stoddard-Loomis sang until she drifted back to sleep.

PART FIVE

Maggie feared the worst as she went in first Jamison's room and then David's room to check on William and found him missing. Silently gliding down to Carolyn's room, she peeked in and almost started laughing. She smirked to see the little tyke was wrapped up in all the blankets and Carolyn in her sheer nightgown balanced on the edge of the bed without anything covering her at all. The boy looked oddly safe and content nestled in the covers and Carolyn appeared so distraughtly forlorn while the little miscreant took over her bed.

"I wish I had a camera." She watched as Carolyn woke, blinked her eyes and looked up at her.

"What's the story here?" Maggie had to know.

"I'm scared, Aunt Carolyn!" she mimicked the little con man's voice. Maggie chuckled to herself as she roused the young man from his sleep. William woke as boys did fussily, aggravated and hesitantly as his brown eyes blinked and realized where he was. Maggie grinned at his weird gestures and lifted him up as the blonde heiress watched with glee as the little rug rat was removed from her presence. William was barely awake as was placed down on his feet in the bathroom at the end of the corridor. He opened a suspicious eye at the bathtub being filled with water.

"Who's that for?" He asked.

"Who do you think?" Maggie grinned as she briefly looked into his tiny round brown eyes for just a second before they vanished on her down the hall. "I have Jamison take a bath every morning, and you are going to do the same…" She looked up the empty spot where William used to be!

"Someone stop that kid!" Maggie hollered ahead as she watched Angelique's boy dash out of the room. She stood up straight and nearly collided with her husband.

"Quentin," She stopped. "Where'd he go?"

"I don't know." Her husband was rarely serious. "Someone ran up my chest, danced on my head for a minute then darted down my back like a squirrel."

"Squirrel is about right." Maggie realized as she followed the path left in the rascal's wake. Coming up the stairs, Roger barely reacted as the little midget Collins ran under him and down to the first floor. Mrs. Johnson had to grin at the sight of him darting down the back stairs in pajamas then turned to grab him just before two lively little legs rushed across the sofa, before the fireplace, under the piano, through the short hallway to the dining room and met Jamison in the kitchen.

"This way!" the two partners-in-crime joined forces against the adults and ran around the huge dining room table with Maggie and Mrs. Johnson after them and back into the drawing room. It was just a game to them, but to Jamison's mother and Mrs. Johnson, it was a challenge to their physical and mental acuity. While William and Jamison had youth and a size advantage, Maggie realized she had brains and experience.

"Stop them before they get to the hidden passageway!" Carolyn called ahead. Joining the chase, she and Maggie just barely caught a glimpse of the two boys and the secret door slamming shut. Carolyn couldn't stop herself! She slid across the drawing room floor and cracked against the wall closing against her.

"Get back out here and take your bath!" Maggie screamed for them.

All she heard returning was the giggling of two elf-like boys hiding somewhere in the cramp secret passages behind the wall of the drawing room.

PART SIX

Angelique sat by the bathtub and grinned happily as her little girl splashed and played with the water of her bath. She cooed and made funny noises to her baby as she squeezed the shampoo in her daughter's head into various shapes before rinsing it out. Little Sara was looking more and more like her everyday. Caring so much for her blue-eyed angel, Angelique's mystical senses once more lightened after many years as she heard her first-born screaming from Collinwood. She paused and listened from afar to the terror her son invoked on his relatives.

"She's trying to get him to take a bath." Angelique mind was on her son while she wrapped a towel around her daughter's little body. "She has my sympathies."

At the main house, Carolyn squeezed out of the passageway. Maggie stood arms folded as Liz grinned very amused as her daughter became a parent. Even Quentin smirked at the sight.

"Get them?" He asked.

"No, I didn't get them!" Carolyn gasped sarcastically and brushed back her long hair. "I hear them in there, but I can't see them!" She paused and tried to think. No child was going to outwit her no matter how often it occurred. There was only one person who knew the secret passageways of Collinwood better than anyone else, and he was gone to college. Or was he…

"Hi!" Someone called as they entered the foyer. If David Collins didn't bring his dirty laundry home from college, no one would ever see the kids again. "I'm home!" He scratched the beard he had developed and pulled back his long hair shaped into a mullet. Kissing his Aunt Liz, he looked to where Carolyn and Maggie stood outside the open drawing room secret door and peered back at him.

"What?" David asked.

"David…" Maggie stood arms folded. "How well do you recall these passages?"

"Very well…" He looked round for his father and new stepmother then to his cousin and former governess. "Why?"

"David," Liz spoke up sipping her morning coffee. "There's two little boys hiding in there somewhere and they're making them look foolish…"

"Mother…" Carolyn remised.

"Can you get in and get them out?" Liz continued.

"You're kidding…" David realized he would be reliving his past once more in those tight and crampt spaces inside the wall. A few minutes later, he found himself crawling through familiar dusty passages he had shown to both Amy Jennings and Hallie Stokes over ten years ago. He and Hallie even used to kiss in some of these ventilation spaces and sneak out after hours to run to town. Outside the wall, his cousin and former governess stood ready to grab the rug-rats as David squeezed into the opening in his old room upstairs and rooted the boys out. The ending always ended with screams.

"Gotcha." Carolyn grabbed William and Maggie grabbed Jamison. The two hellions squirmed like fish as they were lifted up and carried back upstairs. Jamison needed a new bath from the cobwebs and dust and William resisted and struggled to break free. David emerged very dustily to greet his father and stepmother. Roger stood proudly to see his hippie-like son needing a shave and haircut while his third wife Rachel hugged him as if he were her own.

"Was I ever that bad?" David emerged from the passageway and dusted himself off as he tried to strike a conversation with his father.

"I seem to remember a young man who removed the bleeder valve from my car." Roger mumbled under his breath as he responded.

PART SEVEN

Cleaned, scrubbed and dressed like a proper Collins should be, Angelique Collins's favorite boy pranced up to the breakfast table across from Jamison and happily waited on his breakfast. Maggie grinned at the look of him and placed a plate with eggs and sausage before him. His angelic face took one look at it and became cartoonishly distorted.

"What is it?" he asked.

"What?" Maggie asked.

"He only eats scrambled eggs." Carolyn reminded Maggie as she took the same eggs, put them back in the pan and scrambled them. Putting them back in front of the boy resulted in the same face.

"Mommy puts cheese on it." William reminded her on them. Maggie rolled her eyes as she took a piece of cheese from the refrigerator and crumbled it by hand over the eggs.

"Aren't you going to melt it?" the boy asked.

"Your mother is spoiling you rotten." Maggie was quickly losing her temper as Carolyn intervened. The blonde heiress took the plate, heated it in the microwave for a few minutes and then transferred the breakfast to another plate to keep the youth from burning himself. William smiled gleefully a minute before heartily eating his breakfast as fast as he could get it into his mouth. Carolyn grinned with a bit of ego at Maggie as she poured juice for the overly privileged youth. As William tasted his juice, the young man's disapproving face returned.

"Mommy's juice doesn't have stuff floating it in!" He announced.

"How does Angelique stand him!" Carolyn did a double take.

"Look, young man," Maggie had had enough. She leaned across the breakfast table unwilling to have her will broken by someone barely half her size. "You either eat what's in front of you or you go hungry! Understand!"

William responded by looking up innocently, pushing his chair out and heading up the back stairs. Jamison watched and became amused as his mother's jaw dropped.

"Maggie, logic does not work on these kids." Carolyn reported as she went off to retrieve the spoiled brat.

PART EIGHT

It was three o'clock as the sun dipped down behind the trees surrounding the main house at Collinwood. With Barnabas bonding with his daughter, Angelique left dinner heating at the Old House and walked up to the main house and looked for her other little angel. She might have been responsible for spoiling her babies, but to her, they were worth it! In her mind, there were no two other wonderful children in the entire world.

"Where's my baby?" she knelt to her feet as her three foot tall son peeked over the top of the balcony to her from the top hallway.

"Mommy!" The boy's face lit up as his little legs scampered down the steps and jumped into her arms. She smiled the biggest smile she could as her boy hugged her back the tightest he ever had before.

"Were you a good boy?" She smiled as Carolyn and Maggie came to see the boy go. They shared a grin of relief between them.

"Oh, you know..." the boy flashed his crooked little grin: the one Carolyn called the sign of the devil. "Can I come back up here next time?"

Maggie and Carolyn briefly went into shock!

"We'll see." Angelique noticed their reaction and understood. Realizing how she may have over-indulged her son, she briefly thanked them a second for taking William off her hands for one day. They watched as William's brown round eyes looked back to them for a minute and stayed standing on the front veranda of the mansion as Angelique lead William by the hand on a motherly walk past the old greenhouse and  
vanished back into the tree line on the way to the Old House. They shared a glance for a minute and then turned to each other as Carolyn closed the front doors.

"He wants to come back..." Maggie cringed.

"Want to help me board up the doors?" Carolyn suggested.

END


End file.
